Down in a Hole
by Literary-Disaster
Summary: [DIALOGUE HEAVY][ODD POV] The tombstones of the South Park Cemetery witness the boggling appearance of four young boys armed with flashlights, shovels, and a dead body.
_**Notes:
**_ **This was written as a response to the /r/fanfiction Pick Your Challenge over on Reddit. The prompts I chose were Make Me Feel (character emotion can only be expressed via dialogue and body language) and Odd POV (a point of view from an odd thing, such as a chair or a person's pants). With all that said, there is an alternate scriptfic version of this hosted on Ao3. In that version, I believe the boys' dialogue really shines and better captures the rapid-fire nature of their jabs and insults.**

 **Go to archiveofourown*org/works/6810796/chapters/15552163 for the screenplay version.**

* * *

 _ **Down in a Hole:  
Prose/Novel Version**_

* * *

It was all quiet in the cemetery. Not a creature was stirring, not even a canary. But this wasn't surprising. Canaries usually didn't sing at night, unless they were some sort of zombie canary, worked midnights, or both. Canaries aside, this was just another night to the tombstone of Richard C. Sucker. The moon was out. Not a cloud was in the sky. But Richard's tombstone didn't know any better. It, after all, was just a tombstone.

If this tombstone had a consciousness, which it didn't, it would have realized that something was off on this night. Three small beams of lights were approaching from the front gate. Rarely did this happen. The people of this small town rarely hunted ghosts in the cemetery. Too many superstitions. Too many fears.

"God dammit!" cried a hushed child's voice. Three lights had become two. "My flashlight just died!" If the tombstone knew any better, it would have thought that the boy this voice belonged to sounded as if he were choking on his own body weight.

"That's what you get for taking the batteries from your mom's vibrator, fat ass," beguiled another. This voice was slightly nasally, high in pitch, and spoke in a rather matter-of-factly tone, but these details were lost to Mr. Sucker's grave marker.

The three edged closer to Mr. Sucker's resting place but stopped just shy at the large leafy oak tree nearby. This tree was a popular spot among the tombstones in this cemetery, at least within the alternate universe in which they have minds and language by which to communicate. In the summer, it offered shade to keep the area cool. In autumn, its colors provided artwork that tombstones just couldn't appreciate. In winter… Well, this train of thought would continue, but tombstones sometimes lacked the ability to keep that going. Sometimes, of course, actually meaning all the time.

"This'll do," whispered a third child. "Start digging."

The three of them set down their light sources and did just that. Normal individuals would normally be wondering what three children were doing in a cemetery at night with flashlights and shovels. The tombstones never considered wondering about this, much like how they never really considered the world around them. They didn't even start questioning what was happening with all the squeaks and scurry noises that filled the air. They had no need to wonder. After all, they were just tombstones.

"Ay! What's with all the leptospirosis with legs?" demanded the fat sounding one as he danced to avoid the ocean of rats scurrying around their feet.

The third child, whose voice had not been previously described as smooth, enquired, "The klepto-steer-whatsis?"

The tombstone saw a flash of red and tan as the humanoid blob child stepped briefly into the light to kick repeatedly at the little creatures. He finally struck one and sent it careening over the barbed fence and out of the cemetery. The tombstone would have been impressed by such a feat, if it had the ability to be so, especially considering that this action was accomplished by someone who never exercised and looked the part. The rats were impressed, though. They were so impressed that they ran off to find their comrade who was now missing in action.

"You mean the rats?" said the nasally boy clad in green and orange. He struck his shovel into the ground and pulled up a clump of sod and clay.

"Durr, assholes!" said the fat one. "What else would I be friggin' talking about?! The zombie Jesus?!"

Green and Orange responded, "Gee, I dunno, fat ass." He pointed to the oak tree under which they were standing. "Maybe you should ask that dead body over there by that tree."

The one designated fat ass shot back, "Why the hell would I do that? He ain't gonna tell me jack!"

"True." The boy in brown and blue shoveled as he spoke. "But god damn is he attracting a lot of rats."

"Maybe it's 'cause he's salty," fat ass said.

"What does salt have to do with anything?" Nasally green pulled up another clump of clay and tossed it aside.

"Well, deer-licks are salty and attract deer," fat ass said excitedly. "Poor people usually have salty buttholes ('cause they're poor), so maybe he's, like, some kinda rat-lick."

The three boys fell into a shoveling silence. If Richard C.'s tombstone had the capacity, it would have noticed something off about this silence. It wasn't a silence of thought. It wasn't even a silence of concentration, but it was certainly a silence of something.

Queried the smooth-voiced child, "And you know this about his butthole how?"

"What the hell is this?!" cried the fat one as his belly quivered from his shaking. "The freaking Spanish Inquisition?!"

Green and orange stopped his shoveling to lean against his shovel. "I think you can answer the question, Cartman," he said with a frown.

"Suck my balls, asshole," retorted the one now known to the tombstones as Cartman. He extended a middle sausage-like finger starwards. "I ain't answerin' crap."

"Dude, we're out here because you killed him!" smooth stated with a rise in his pitch.

Orange and green shook a fist with an interjection of "You bastard!"

"So stop being an asshole, fat ass."

Cartman shrugged before continuing his shoveling. "Hey," he said, "I told him not to touch my friggin' Sega Dreamcast controller, and he did it anyway!"

Nasally Green also continued his shoveling, but continued to stare Cartman down as well. "You didn't have to throw the fucking TV at his head, artard!"

"What? I told him it was a warning throw! It's not my fault the stupid asshole decided to walk into it!"

Smooth chimed in, "You didn't say anything about a warning shot, lard tub!"

"Up yours, hippie! I did too!"

"Cartman, we were there!"

The boy in green and orange stopped his actions to stare into his hands. "I'll-" His voice wavered. "I'll never be able to sleep again without hearing his screams of terror, seeing the look of fear in his eyes…"

"Well, he shouldn't have touched my god damn Sega Dreamcast controller," Cartman declared. He attempted to fold his arms across his rather large bosom. It, unfortunately for him, looked more like someone had struggled to tie the end of an overly filled balloon. Not that a tombstone knew what that was or even cared.

Smooth again spoke. "Cartman, don't you feel any sort of remorse at all?"

Cartman's eyes went wide. "Should I?" he said in a half-whisper. A fellow human being would know this expression. They'd know this expression well. However, Richard C. Sucker's tombstone and its colleagues were clueless. They were tombstones after all.

"Durr, fat ass!" Smooth hippie spat out.

"Go durr yourself, hippie licker!" Cartman responded in kind; the ground beneath him receiving rain.

"It's a god damn Dreamcast controller, Cartman!" Orange said.

"It's SEGA Dreamcast, asshole!" Cartman said. "And up yours, Jew! You know how hard those are to find these days?"

Said Smooth with a chuckle, "eBay?"

"Shut up!" demanded Cartman with a pound of his shovel to the ground.

"Amazon?" giggled the one now known as Jew. This name meant nothing to the tombstones. If you can guess why, then kudos to you.

"Drink my pee, Kahl!" Cartman cried with a sausage link pointed in Jew Kyle's direction.

"The pawn shop?" Smooth seemed hell-bent in continuing this line of questioning.

"There's also that one place in Denver…" Kyle let his sentence trail off, almost as if he were expecting someone to finish it for him.

Smooth hippie was the first to respond, "Rip-Off Games?" He received a confirmation in his correctness. All seemed to be right in the world.

At least, it had been until Cartman balled his fists and shook them. "God dammit!" he bellowed. "Shut the hell up, you guys! I'm trying to-"

"Be annoying?" chimed Kyle in a sing-song manner.

"Be a fat ass?" Smooth also chimed in a similar way.

"God dammit, you fags! For the last god damn time, I am not fucking fat! My mom said so!"

The tombstone watched in silence as Kyle and his non-fat friend shared a frowning look. The three boys held their positions for an undetermined amount of time (such things were lost to stone slabs). Cartman was the first to react. "Well? Say something, god dammit!" he demanded.

Smooth eventually was the first to react by continuing his shoveling. "Dude," he said with a smirk, "I think your mom needs to lay off the crack whoring and actually take a look at you." This left Cartman staring in shock with his mouth slightly agape, like a hungry frog waiting for flies.

"What." Expertly stated as a statement opposed to a question. I know this. You can infer this. But would a tombstone? Possibly not.

Kyle snickered quietly before blurting out, "Yeah, you're so fucking fat that when her clients show up, they think, 'God damn! That's a sweet ass bean bag chair! Let's bang ass on that!'" Both he and Smooth stifled giggles as they resumed their digging.

Cartman, on the other hand, continued to stare, this time with his gaping maw shut. He attempted to spit out, "How- How did you-" before ultimately screaming in a temper tantrum, "Kahl! I swear to god, I will kick you in the nuts!"

Kyle embedded his shovel into the ground once again to lean on it. "No, you won't," he said with a straight face.

Cartman pounded his clenched hamfists on an imaginary table before pointing a sausage link in their direction. "You can bet your Christ-killing Jew powers that I will!"

"No, you won't."

"I will! I swear it!"

"Think he will, Stan?"

Smooth, now known to the tombstones as Stan, shook his head with a shrug. "No way, dude," he said. "Not a chance."

Cartman again shook his fists and pointed. "Oh, yeah? Watch me!" he shouted.

"You do, and you'll be the only one shoveling your mess away, fat ass," Kyle said as he took his shovel back in hand. He shared a quick glance with Stan before the two of them continued shoveling in silence. Cartman huffed loudly before continuing himself.

An indeterminate amount of time passed before Cartman finally blurted out in a harsh whisper, "I fucking hate you, Kahl." Time was only indeterminate purely because Richard C. Sucker's tombstone wasn't very good at keeping time.

Silence once again fell over the group. There was something in the air surrounding these three, but tombstones had no clue how to read such things. All they knew was how to mark the resting place of an individual and fade away over time when they are eventually forgotten. Even time can fell the quiet and stoic, but such deep philosophical musings fall short in the minds of tombstones. All that concerned them was remaining upright in the soil and proudly displaying words they didn't understand.

Cartman eventually broke the silence. "You guys?"

Stan was quick with the rebuttal, "Not interested." The shoveling continued without pause.

"Seriously, you guys! Doesn't this remind you of that one show?"

It was Kyle's turn for a rebuttal. Unlike Stan's uninterested dismissal, Kyle actually paused to glare in Cartman's direction. "Shut up, jigglypuff," he said. "We don't care. Just dig."

"God dammit, Kahl!" Cartman shouted, waking the spirits. "Stop bein' such a god damn Jew! And listen to me!"

"No," Stan said as he, again, continued his shoveling with a lack of interest in everything else going on around him.

Cartman animatedly swung his chicken wing arms around as he spoke. "You guys, I'm seriously!" he said with a Cheshire smile. "This is like Scott Bakula and that other dude with the cigar that traveled through time helping people do stuff, like go to prom or somethin'."

Stan and Kyle stopped their dirt moving and shared another look. Stan was the first to react with a sigh before stating, "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Kyle, on the other hand, was more vocal and animated than Stan. He leaned across the pit they were digging and pointed at Cartman. "This isn't Quantum Leap, fat ass!" he shouted. "In fact, this is nothing like Quantum Leap! You're not Scott Bakula, we're not the other guy, none of us are wearing women's clothing, and how THE FUCK is this like time traveling?!"

Cartman, taken aback, tapped a gloved finger on his bottom lip while looking skyward. Eventually, he softly blurted out, "Uh, we're traveling to the future one second at a time?"

Stan lowered his face into his hand to better pinch his nose off. He muttered, "Oh, Jesus Christ. You're such an artard."

Kyle tossed his shovel aside and wiped his hands together. "Well, at any rate, I think this hole is deep enough," he said while looking around into the darkness. "Where the hell is Butters?"

Another light appeared to come from the front of the cemetery. "Hiya, fellahs!" cried another child's voice from the darkness. "I got that tarp you wanted!"

"It's about god damn time, asshole!" Cartman huffed. "Where the fuck have you been?!"

The one designated as Butters, a meek-looking awkward sort of a child appeared in the group. In his hands, he clutched a large dark and folded blue vinyl tarp. "Wuh-well, I'm sorry!" he stammered. "Buh-but my dad saw me takin' his tarp an-and he got awfully sore at me."

Stan frowned and held out his hand. "That's nice, Butters," he said with indifference. "Give us the tarp."

Butters wrung his hands together as if folding invisible laundry and looked from Stan to Kyle to Cartman and back again. "He grounded me, fellahs!" he said. "And rightfully so! That'll teach me to suh-steal from his shed again!"

Stan's eyebrow's furrowed before snapping, "Just give us the god damn tarp, Butters!" Before even waiting for a response, Stan ripped the object of conversation from Butters' hands. He flipped it up into the air to spread it out to its full length and width and let it settle into the hole the boys had dug.

"Oh. Okay," Butters muttered. "Wuh-what do you need this old thing for anyway?"

Ignoring the question asked, Kyle nodded in Cartman's direction. "Okay, Cartman, do it."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Cartman muttered as he headed towards the body lying at the nearby tree. He disappeared from the tombstone's field a view for a moment, before returning with a body of another child in tow. He grunted as he tossed the lifeless ragdoll into the pit with a resounding thud.

The child known as Butters started wringing out his sopping wet dishrag again. He watched the scene unfold with eyes as wide as the full moon with which werewolves were just so fascinated. "Fuh-fellahs?"

"Not now, Butters!" Stan hushed him with a palm to his face. Kyle glared in Butters' direction briefly before folding the remainder of the tarp over the deceased. This was the cue for the three boys to begin filling in the hole. Kyle retrieved his shovel and was the first to pile in a large spoonful of soil.

Butters stepped closer to Cartman and looked down into the makeshift grave. "Whuh-what happened to Kenny?" he asked quietly.

Cartman stopped digging and laughed heartedly. "We're playing a game, Butters!" he exclaimed with wide open arms.

This prompted Butters to smile and his eyes to shine. "Really? Can I play too?" Or perhaps that was the light from the multitude of flashlights reflecting in his eyes. The tombstone couldn't tell. Not that it knew the difference. Stan and Kyle shared a look but continued shoveling.

"Sure, dude," Stan said with a nod.

"Yeah! It's really fun!" Kyle said, also with a nod.

"Oh, boy!" Butters exclaimed as he hopped in place. "How do I play?"

"Very simple, Butters!" Cartman forced his shovel into Butters' hands. "You fill this hole in, and then you stay here and defend Kenny from anyone wearing a blue suit!

"Oh, boy! I can't wait!" Butters cried.

"I'm sure you can't," Cartman muttered with a snicker.

"So Kenny's playin' dead?"

Everyone jumped when a muffled unintelligible voice came from the bottom of the pit. They all cautiously approached the edge before looking over. Stan was the first to speak. "Dude, Kenny says he's not dead."

Cartman's eyes widened, but his vocal tone betrayed the look. "Yes, he is."

Again, the muffled voice filtered up through a tarp and a layer of dirt. Whatever it was that was said sent Cartman into a fit of rage. "No, you're not!" he shouted. "You're stone fucking dead!" He then proceeded to beat at the boy in the hole with his shovel until it was covered in blood. He stopped to catch his breath and shrugged. "See? Dead."

Kyle frowned. "Huh. How about that," he mused.

Stan stabbed his shovel into the ground. "You guys," he said. "I think I learned something today."

"What's that?" Cartman asked.

There was a moment of silence. The tombstone would have relished in this moment if it had been able. Cemeteries were normally places of quiet rest for those who done their time and had earned their peaceful sleep. However, these boys were non-stop rapid-fire chatter with difficult to follow conversations. The cemetery would be a better place without them, their foul mouths, and their murderous streaks. The tombstones collectively, though, had no real opinion on the matter. They were, after all, inanimate stone slabs. They simply had no clue.

Stan said, "Nah, I lost it. Let's go play Generic Mascot Kart." He shrugged, turned, and walked off into the darkness in the direction of the front gate.

Kyle tossed his shovel into the pit with a cry of "Sweet!" and followed suit.

"I get to be first player, you guys!" Cartman cried as he grabbed the flashlights and followed the other two, leaving Butters, the tree, and, more importantly, the tombstones alone to the peace and quiet of the night. Butters bit his lip and eyed the shovel in his hands. After some sort of internal monologue, he began shoveling dirt and clay into Kenny's shallow unmarked grave.

"Duh-don't you worry, Kenny," Butters stammered. "I'll protect you from those monsters in blue suits, boy howdy! Even if I hafta die trying! No copper's takin' me alive! Grave Digger Butters is on the case!"

As stated previously, tombstones lack a particular type of consciousness and thought process that we as humans take for granted. However, on this particular night, at this particular moment, and with human-like conscious clarity the tombstone of Richard C. Sucker realized something. A body was being buried without a gravestone, a marker to forever remind those that would come after him that Kenny had existed, that he had been a living breathing individual with hopes, dreams, and a ColecoVision on a black and white television. To a gravestone, there was nothing sadder than a body buried without a mark. It wanted to shed a tear in sadness for this young man bludgeoned to death by a television and a shovel, but found that it couldn't. It was, after all, just a tombstone. And that… That was the saddest bit of it all.


End file.
